gas/NEWS

   1 -*- text -*-
   2
   3 Changes since 2.5:
   4
   5 Gas now directly supports macros, without requiring GASP.
   6
   7 Gas now has an MRI assembler compatibility mode.
   8
   9 Added -mips4 support to MIPS assembler.
  10
  11 Added PIC support to Solaris and SPARC SunOS 4 assembler.
  12
  13 Changes since 2.3:
  14
  15 Converted this directory to use an autoconf-generated configure script.
  16
  17 ARM support, from Richard Earnshaw.
  18
  19 Updated VMS support, from Pat Rankin, including considerably improved debugging
  20 support.
  21
  22 Support for the control registers in the 68060.
  23
  24 Handles (ignores) a new directive ".this_GCC_requires_the_GNU_assembler", to
  25 provide for possible future gcc changes, for targets where gas provides some
  26 features not available in the native assembler.  If the native assembler is
  27 used, it should become obvious pretty quickly what the problem is.
  28
  29 Usage message is available with "--help".
  30
  31 The GNU Assembler Preprocessor (gasp) is included.  (Actually, it was in 2.3
  32 also, but didn't get into the NEWS file.)
  33
  34 Weak symbol support for a.out.
  35
  36 A bug in the listing code which could cause an infinite loop has been fixed.
  37 Bugs in listings when generating a COFF object file have also been fixed.
  38
  39 Initial i386-svr4 PIC implementation from Eric Youngdale, based on code by Paul
  40 Kranenburg.
  41
  42 Improved Alpha support.  Immediate constants can have a much larger range now.
  43 Support for the 21164 has been contributed by Digital.
  44
  45 Updated ns32k (pc532-mach, netbsd532) support from Ian Dall.
  46
  47 Changes since 2.2:
  48
  49 Mach i386 support, by David Mackenzie and Ken Raeburn.
  50
  51 RS/6000 and PowerPC support by Ian Taylor.
  52
  53 VMS command scripts (make-gas.com, config-gas.com) have been worked on a bit,
  54 based on mail received from various people.  The `-h#' option should work again
  55 too.
  56
  57 HP-PA work, by Jeff Law.  Note, for the PA, gas-2.3 has been designed to work
  58 with gdb-4.12 and gcc-2.6.  As gcc-2.6 has not been released yet, a special
  59 version of gcc-2.5.8 has been patched to work with gas-2.3.  You can retrieve
  60 this special version of gcc-2.5.8 via anonymous ftp from jaguar.cs.utah.edu
  61 in the "dist" directory.
  62
  63 Vax support in gas fixed for BSD, so it builds and seems to run a couple simple
  64 tests okay.  I haven't put it through extensive testing.  (GNU make is
  65 currently required for BSD 4.3 builds.)
  66
  67 Support for the DEC Alpha, running OSF/1 (ECOFF format).  The gas support is
  68 based on code donated by CMU, which used an a.out-based format.  I'm afraid the
  69 alpha-a.out support is pretty badly mangled, and much of it removed; making it
  70 work will require rewriting it as BFD support for the format anyways.
  71
  72 Irix 5 support.
  73
  74 The test suites have been fixed up a bit, so that they should work with a
  75 couple different versions of expect and dejagnu.
  76
  77 Symbols' values are now handled internally as expressions, permitting more
  78 flexibility in evaluating them in some cases.  Some details of relocation
  79 handling have also changed, and simple constant pool management has been added,
  80 to make the Alpha port easier.
  81
  82 New option "--statistics" for printing out program run times.  This is intended
  83 to be used with the gcc "-Q" option, which prints out times spent in various
  84 phases of compilation.  (You should be able to get all of them printed out with
  85 "gcc -Q -Wa,--statistics", I think.)
  86
  87 ----------------------------------------------------------------
  88
  89 Changes since 2.1:
  90
  91 RS/6000 AIX and MIPS SGI Irix 5 support has been added.
  92
  93 Configurations that are still in development (and therefore are convenient to
  94 have listed in configure.in) still get rejected without a minor change to
  95 gas/Makefile.in, so people not doing development work shouldn't get the
  96 impression that support for such configurations is actually believed to be
  97 reliable.
  98
  99 The program name (usually "as") is printed when a fatal error message is
 100 displayed.  This should prevent some confusion about the source of occasional
 101 messages about "internal errors".
 102
 103 ELF support is falling into place.  Support for the 386 should be working.
 104 Support for SPARC Solaris is in.  HPPA support from Utah is being integrated.
 105
 106 Symbol values are maintained as expressions instead of being immediately boiled
 107 down to add-symbol, sub-symbol, and constant.  This permits slightly more
 108 complex calculations involving symbols whose values are not alreadey known.
 109
 110 DBX-style debugging info ("stabs") is now supported for COFF formats.
 111 If any stabs directives are seen in the source, GAS will create two new
 112 sections: a ".stab" and a ".stabstr" section.  The format of the .stab
 113 section is nearly identical to the a.out symbol format, and .stabstr is
 114 its string table.  For this to be useful, you must have configured GCC
 115 to generate stabs (by defining DBX_DEBUGGING_INFO), and must have a GDB
 116 that can use the stab sections (4.11 or later).
 117
 118 LynxOS, on i386 and m68k platforms, is now supported.  SPARC LynxOS
 119 support is in progress.
 120
 121 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 122
 123 Changes for 2.1:
 124
 125 Several small fixes for i386-aix (PS/2) support from Minh Tran-Le have been
 126 incorporated, but not well tested yet.
 127
 128 Altered the opcode table split for m68k; it should require less VM to compile
 129 with gcc now.
 130
 131 Some minor adjustments to add (Convergent Technologies') Miniframe support,
 132 suggested by Ronald Cole.
 133
 134 HPPA support (running OSF only, not HPUX) has been contributed by Utah.  This
 135 includes improved ELF support, which I've started adapting for SPARC Solaris
 136 2.x.  Integration isn't completely, so it probably won't work.
 137
 138 HP9000/300 support, donated by HP, has been merged in.
 139
 140 Ian Taylor has finished the MIPS ECOFF (Ultrix, Irix) support.
 141
 142 Better error messages for unsupported configurations (e.g., hppa-hpux).
 143
 144 Test suite framework is starting to become reasonable.
 145
 146 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 147
 148 Changes for 2.0:
 149
 150 Mostly bug fixes.
 151
 152 Some more merging of BFD and ELF code, but ELF still doesn't work.
 153
 154 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 155
 156 Changes for 1.94:
 157
 158 BFD merge is partly done.  Adventurous souls may try giving configure the
 159 "--with-bfd-assembler" option.  Currently, ELF format requires it, a.out format
 160 accepts it; SPARC CPU accepts it.  It's the default only for OS "elf" or
 161 "solaris".  (ELF isn't really supported yet.  It needs work.  I've got some
 162 code from Utah for HP-PA ELF, and from DG for m88k ELF, but they're not fully
 163 merged yet.)
 164
 165 The 68K opcode table has been split in half.  It should now compile under gcc
 166 without consuming ridiculous amounts of memory.
 167
 168 A couple data structures have been reduced in size.  This should result in
 169 saving a little bit of space at runtime.
 170
 171 Support for MIPS, from OSF and Ralph Campbell, has been merged in.  The OSF
 172 code provided ROSE format support, which I haven't merged in yet.  (I can make
 173 it available, if anyone wants to try it out.)  Ralph's code, for BSD 4.4,
 174 supports a.out format.  We don't have ECOFF support in just yet; it's coming.
 175
 176 Support for the Hitachi H8/500 has been added.
 177
 178 VMS host and target support should be working now, thanks chiefly to Eric
 179 Youngdale.
 180
 181 ----------------------------------------------------------------
 182
 183 Changes for 1.93.01:
 184
 185 For m68k, support for more processors has been added: 68040, CPU32, 68851.
 186
 187 For i386, .align is now power-of-two; was number-of-bytes.
 188
 189 For m68k, "%" is now accepted before register names.  For COFF format, which
 190 doesn't use underscore prefixes for C labels, it is required, so variable "a0"
 191 can be distinguished from the register.
 192
 193 Last public release was 1.38.  Lots of configuration changes since then, lots
 194 of new CPUs and formats, lots of bugs fixed.
 195
 196 \f
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